Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Just Say No

The other day I got an IM from some guy I chat with regularly who always wants to be the submissive in cybersex scene. Usually I go along with him because he's unusually imaginative and skilled at cyber. Plus his picture (which may or may not be he) is hot. The scenes have gotten increasingly weird over time, but they certainly haven't pushed the limits of what I'll pretend to be doing while seated safely at my keyboard. Yesterday, he wanted to do a brother-on-brother forced chastity scene. Even before he said hello, he asked me to follow this link.

We didn't get very far with the scene. I had (pretended to) put him in the device and (pretended to) play with his nipples and he had (pretended to) experience some problems when his (notional) irresistible erection began to run into the (notional) unmovable restraint, but then it was time for dinner, so I excused myself. It was just as well: I often find his roleplay scenarios exciting, but this one wasn't doing anything for me.

Before I continue, I have a matter of language to attend to. Contemporary speakers of English (and I use the phrase loosely) have so corrupted vocabulary that "celibacy" and "chastity" are often considered synonymous. Not so. Celibacy is the act of not being married. Chastity is the act of refraining from the act. The confusion is regrettable, but it can be used to advantage in limited circumstances. You can, for example, say that the rate of celibacy is much higher among gays than among breeders, and you will be absolutely correct. If people want to misinterpret what you've said, that really is not your problem.

It (hopefully) will not surprise you to hear that chastity is not something I especially embrace. I remember maybe four or five years ago, I met up with a guy who was a chastity sub looking for, well, I'm really not sure what he was looking for. I think he wanted me to bind him, preferably in some sort of rubber mummification get up and then maybe jerk myself off in his presence. He was quite clear on the fact that he could not be orally or anally penetrated since he was required by his religion (he was a fundamentalist Christian) to remain a virgin until marriage. Anyway, I had lunch with him and asked him a bunch of questions about his background and what he could and couldn't do. He was a nice, if geeky, guy, and he was very excited about the possibility of having found a dominant, but upon due consideration, I concluded that there was nothing for me in the proposed interaction, and I told him that I wasn't interested.

I felt sorry for him, though. He had spent several years as a chastity slave to a master, and that situation had ended for reasons that I don't recall. He was able to get some recreation through one of the local leather groups, but he couldn't find another master, and he didn't have much of a community. Most of the people who were into Christianity-based dominance/submission were heterosexual couples who didn't approve of homosexuality on religious grounds and so didn't even want him hanging out on their websites.

I don't have any statistics to back this up, but my sense is that while dom/sub behavior is more prevalent in same-sex than in opposite-sex interactions, male chastity submission is an almost exclusively heterosexual phenomenon. (There's always an exception, of course.) If you have a strong constitution, google "male chastity devices" sometime and see what you come up with. Egad. There's a lot of this sort of thing. And worse. There's a lot of fiction in which female writers (and probably male submissives) fantasize about redressing millenia of unequal gender treatment by functionally castrating their husbands, who then have the privilege of watching their wives pleasured by a variety of studs. I assume the studs are largely of the human variety, but who knows?

Above all, I want to avoid getting into an extended discussion of breeder sexual habits. After all, they start at eww and just go downhill from there. But I frequently wonder about the shifting boundaries between acceptable alternative sexual practices and sexual pathology, and I'm aware that the gender of the people involved colors my feelings about where various activities lie. For example, I find heterosexual porn to be much more exploitative than gay porn. Similarly, while I find all male chastity submission to be outside the bounds of healthy behavior, I am a great deal more skeeved out at the notion of a married guy giving his wife the keys to his chastity belt than I am at the notion of a male dom keeping the same control over his sub's penis.In my experience, homosexual submission is most often about paradise postponed. The sub will typically not request any form of direct stimulation during play, and, in fact, many will request in advance that you not stimulate them or get agitated if you start to, say, fondle their cocks during the session. When it's all over and they're alone, though, it's a safe bet that the sub is going to jerk himself off to a cataclysmic ejaculation while mentally reliving the scene.

The impulse towards (non-chaste) slavery is something else again, I think. I am not infrequently approached online by guys who are looking to be owned. These guys typically appear to be looking for some combination of freedom from having to make any decisions (appealing to just about everyone at some time or other) and a free ride. They may want to be kept in degrading positions and conditions, but they definitely want to be kept. When I'm approached by these slave wannabes, I typically deal with them by asking them a series of questions designed to point out to them that there is no reliable way for me to generate a revenue stream from them. I find slavery morally repugnant, of course, but the slave wannabes don't get that concept. If I can show them that they'd be of no economic benefit to me, they seem better to appreciate my lack of interest in human ownership. But that's a different issue. Most would-be slaves are submissive, but they're still going to want sexual gratification. They're just not going to want you to see them get it. They'll cum later, when you're not around.

And that's cool, right? God knows there are plenty of times when I'm having sex and I don't want to shoot my load until later. Just as an example, this past Saturday, when I called Christopher and he invited me over, we went after each other like crazed rabbits, but when we disentangled long enough to climb the stairs to the bedroom, he told me that he'd masturbated just before he'd gone shopping so that he'd already cum within the last couple of hours. I told him "That's okay: you're young, you'll bounce back," and he did bounce back, as soon as I started to play with his nipples, and that's always pretty soon. But an hour later, he concluded that another ejaculation was not in his immediate future. He wanted to concentrate on making me cum, instead, but I was really having a terrific time with everything else that was going on, and he had finally relaxed enough (so much sexual energy in that one: it's a little bit like riding a wild horse at the outset) so that we could spend the next half hour in a combination of intense cuddling and understated writhing that was very intimate and even sweet. I dislike being the only one who makes a mess, especially when I'm at someone else's place, so I saved the ejaculation until after I was back home, and it was great.The subs I play with tell me that they do the same thing, at least as far as ejaculation is concerned. They are actually more excited for a longer period by not being allowed to cum. Everything that I've read about heterosexual male chastity leads me to believe that it's largely a way for women to get men to help with the housework. There's a lot of verbiage about "taking away ejaculatory pressures" so that the couple can concentrate more on other activities, but it always comes down to getting the guy to help around the house. There's no talk about letting the guy cum eventually. There's often some discussion of milking him so that he never needs to cum, and there's plenty of discussion of taming a guy who had been jerking off several times a day into an obedient domestic servant who still goes to work every day and brings home a big paycheck for the wife to manage while the hubby's cleaning the toilets with a toothbrush. Granted that much of what's written is fantasy, there is still something fundamentally disturbing about the desire to emasculate men. Heterosexuality is supposed to work because of the intense friction between Venus and Mars, but the chastity people just want to turn Mars into a shadow of Venus. Sometime these guys might want to check out what the atmosphere on Venus is like, though.

Anyway, it's not my business to tell the breeders what to do, and if it's truly consensual and both sides like the arrangement, then, they can go for it, I guess. And I suspect that a very small slice of the hetero pie is into it. I consider it mostly because it informs some of my own feelings about submission. There's this guy, see. He's an army officer in Iraq and an occasional cam buddy of mine. His professed desire is for me to treat him "like a piece of meat." He and I have chatted often enough that I'm sure he knows that this would be an act for me. I reckon he's smart enough not to want to be involved with someone who really thinks of him as nothing but an object, but I could be wrong. Anyway, he's 31, and he's cute (I love military haircuts on slightly chunky men), and he hasn't had sex with a guy (or anyone, I think) since his last relationship ended. In 1998.

The last time he and I chatted, he wanted to make very sure that I didn't do anything to try to give him pleasure while I had him tied up and was fucking his face and trying to pushing my fist in his ass. Of course, the most likely outcome is that we'll never actually meet since he's on active duty until next July. And while he gets very excited when I talk about tying him to the bed so that his head hangs off the edge and his ankles are tied to his wrists so that his ass is exposed up in the air, it's hard to believe any of that would actually happen. Still, he seems legitimately to want it, and I can't help wondering why.

Certainly with a guy like the officer it would be a good deal more pleasurable for me if I tied him up in a less extreme position, made out with him for a good long time, chewed on his nipples for a while and then made him cum while I was fucking him. That's a more common scenario with a married (but gay or bi) sub who needs the pretense that he can't help what's going on to give him permission to enjoy himself. That sort of married guy often will ultimately learn to give himself permission and progress to more equal man-on-man sessions.

I don't know that the same is true for someone who wants to be treated like meat. Certainly I hope it's true. I hope that the pretense of objectification with someone who doesn't truly want to objectify him helps him get to the point where he's comfortable saying that he wants to be pleased as well as to please. And I'm not so much happy with the notion of the pretense in the first place. But if he shows up to be used, would I do it, even if I were sure that he'd continue to seek out the same thing indefinitely? I'm pretty sure I would. I did tell him no when he asked about a rape role play, though. There are limits.